Mission & Overview

In an age in which all forms of knowledge and experience can find their way to the computer, "computation," whether it be the actual manipulation of digital encodings or a framing for discussion, is central to many of the investigations and innovations that range across the humanities, arts, and sciences. In this way, computation becomes a nexus for much of epistemology and thus, a cause of and opportunity for collaboration.

The mission of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College is to support this broad view of computational investigation across campus, and to catalyze creative thought throughout the Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, and Business, for undergraduates, graduate students and faculty.

If history has taught us anything, it has taught us not to underestimate the growth and impact of computing technology.

It is hard today to imagine an office on a university campus (or anywhere else for that matter) that is without a computer. And these computers are not simply acting as word processors. Artists and art historians are creating and analyzing art, dance choreographers are modeling, synthesizing, and analyzing dance, psychologists are analyzing brain patterns, linguists are developing models of human and animal language, economists are modeling economic and social trends, biologists are sequencing the genome, chemists are discovering new compounds, physicists are exploring the origins of the universe, engineers are building smaller and more powerful microchips, and mathematicians are proving theorems. Underneath all of these advances is the computer and the remarkable successes of computer scientists and mathematicians. It is this theme of computing across the campus that inspires the Neukom Institute.

Our primary goal for the Neukom Institute is to enable Dartmouth students and faculty to integrate computational technology into their curriculum, scholarship and most critically into their thinking. As described above, nearly every discipline across the campus can benefit from computational technology – our goal is to integrate computational advances into these disciplines, to support the development of new technologies that will change the way we all think and work, and to try to imagine what is probably an unimaginable future.